Vasant Panchami 2016

Tomorrow is Vasant Panchami, a spring festival in Northern India. It is also Saraswati’s birthday, and the day that her puja is held. While Vasant Panchami as a spring festival is pretty much confined to northern India (for reasons of climate, obviously), the Indian government has promoted Saraswati Puja as a Pan-Indian holiday in an effort to boost literacy rates.

The current literacy rate in India is 71.2%; this is well below the global average of 84%. There is also a stark gap between the sexes. In 2011, when the last census was performed (and when the literacy rate was measured at 75%) male literacy rate was 82.14% while the women only came in at 65.46%.